She could have screamed. She could have slammed her door shut. She could have picked up her phone and called her father, or the police, or even, with some thought and investigation, his wife. She could have ended his life. She had the power. She was in control.

Why, then, did she not do any of these things? Why, instead of fear or outrage, did she feel a strange thrill of discovery, as if his gaze had remade her into someone else entirely? Why did she cross the landing to where he stood, take his hands in hers, put them on her waist, and hold up her face for him to kiss her?

The candles were cool enough to handle. She swept them recklessly into her bag and crawled out beneath the shutter. The pub was still open, her father still safe behind the bar. The shadows sheltered her as she made her silent way back, up over the bins to the porch roof and back in through the bathroom window. As she pulled it shut, she heard the faint chime of the bell for last orders. She wiped salt from her cheeks and reached into her rucksack for her diary.

So, I saw him. Did I love it, or did I hate it? Am I exploiting him? Is he exploiting me? Why can’t these things just be fucking simple?

Today might have been the last time, or it might not.

The bloody compliment

As they travelled, the brother and sister met a very rich powerful man, with a very rich powerful house. It was the sort of house that looks lovely from the outside, and when you see it, you think that the people inside it must be very special in all ways – richer and taller and cleverer and more beautiful and more amusing and more tragic and just generally more, in every possible way.

Perhaps one day you might be invited inside a house like this one, and if you’re lucky, you’ll just be a guest, because once you’re on the inside you’ll quickly realise that the people inside these houses are just as lost and confused as you, and they’ve only invited you in because they hope you’ll see them in the way they wish they truly were.

Or perhaps they’ll be something worse than lost and confused. They may actually believe they are richer and taller and cleverer and more beautiful and more amusing and more tragic and just generally more. Those people are very hard to be around. If you happen to find yourself in a house of any description with people like that, I suggest you leave quickly.

But the man the brother and sister met was the most dangerous kind of all. He was the kind of person who looks at someone else and sees, not who they really are, but who the person doing the looking wants them to be.

He looked at the boy’s sister and he didn’t see all the things about her that were true. He didn’t see that she was fierce and brave and wild and strange and dangerous and strong in all the ways she’d had to learn to be, to keep her little brother safe as they wandered through the world. He looked at her and thought, She’s beautiful. He looked at her and thought, She needs protecting. He looked at her and thought, She’d make the perfect wife for me.